blog.cannot.fail

Opinions stated as Fact. Also the Blog for We Cannot Fail LLC, Makers of Off the Clock and other fine things.

[wecannotfailblog-blog]

(via The Psychology of Healthy Facebook Use: No Comparing to Other Lives - The Atlantic)

“... That's why the more time we spend on Facebook, the more likely we are to feel depressed." The other phrase I’ve heard for this is “Compare and Despair”. 

[heidiroizen]

[wecannotfailblog-blog]

Great and articulate post from heidiroizen:

This is a grim fairy tale about a mythical company and its mythical founder. While I concocted this story, I did so by drawing upon my sixteen years of experience as a venture capitalist, plus the fourteen years I spent before that as an entrepreneur. I’m going to use some pretty simple math and...

[getlooseleaf]

[wecannotfailblog-blog]

Good step-by-step rundown on App Store Optimization!

When I launched Loose Leaf, I’d heard about how bad app discovery was in the App Store, so I’d assumed any search optimization I did for the App Store would be a wasted effort. If quality Twitter apps are outranked by unrelated apps , it seems like a crap shoot to even try, so I didn’t.

Big...

[wecannotfailblog-blog]

JavaScript code for extracting all the #hashtags from a string into an array

          var sourceText = "Now is the #time (and the #TIME), for all #GoodMen to come to the aid of #Their-Country!";            var re = /(^|\s)(#[a-z\d-]+)/ig;                    var hashTags = sourceText.match(re);            if (hashTags == null) {                hashTags = undefined;            }            else {                // remove any extra spaces and lowercase them.                for (var i=0; i < hashTags.length; i++) {                    hashTags[i] = hashTags[i].trim().toLowerCase();                }

               // remove duplicates                hashTags = hashTags.filter(function(value, index, self) {                    return self.indexOf(value) === index;                });            }            console.log(hashTags);

[wecannotfailblog-blog]

(via MockUPhone - One Click to Wrap App Screenshots in Device Mockup!)

MockUPhone is a great, free, easy to use service for getting the screenshots you save from the iPhone simulator onto mock devices.

[wecannotfailblog-blog]

Ionic: styling specific to iOS & iPad

When I tested out Off the Clock on the new iPod Touch I purchased to make App Preview videos, I noticed a CSS problem on one of my pages that didn’t occur on the iPad Mini 2 I had originally been using to test, or on any Android devices. I had noticed it in the iPhone simulator, but had assumed it was a simulator issue since things looked fine on the iPad. Clearly that was a bad assumption. 

Changing the Ionic-assigned style for all iOS devices made things look bad on the iPad, so I needed a way to have Android and the iPad use one style, and iPhones use another. This looks ugly, but it seemed to work in the end. Android devices use the first one, all iOS devices then use the second one, and only iPads use the third (which is basically a copy of the first).  

.gifSearchScroll {    top: 140px !important; }

.platform-ios .gifSearchScroll {    top: 160px !important; }

.platform-ios .platform-ipad .gifSearchScroll {    top: 140px !important; }

[wecannotfailblog-blog]

Creating App Preview Videos for iTunes and Play Stores

I had read that App Preview videos were a good thing to have (here’s what Apple says) so I figured I’d try to make one for Off the Clock. After doing the research it seemed like trying to make the video from the iPhone simulator was going to be too much trouble, so I decided to try doing it using Apple’s recommended method - connecting an iOS 8 device to a Mac running Yosemite and capture video using Quicktime. 

I had been delaying upgrading my Macbook to Yosemite, but bit the bullet. I had done all my development testing for OTC on an iPad Mini 2, but wanted to make my video for iPhones, so I ended up buying an iPod Touch (5th generation) with a 4″ retina display. Following the instructions in this document it was pretty straightforward to capture the video. I had never used iMovie before so there was a bit of a learning curve there, but I was able to get a basic 30 second video created.

Capturing the video and making the movie were enough of a pain in the ass that I didn’t want to do it more than once. So for now, no iPad preview. I did want to support all the different size iPhones however, and just use my one main video to do it. 

iMovie appears to use the first piece of content added to the movie as the indicator of your video dimensions. Since I had used all videos imported from the iPod Touch, the output video from iMovie was 640x1136. According to this chart that would work for 5 series phones, but I would need different dimensions for 6 and 6+. I did some quick searching and found this post on StackOverflow with a tip for using ffmpeg to create other size videos. So I exported the video from iMovie as a high quality file and then used ffmpeg to create the 750x1334 and 1080x1920 versions of the video, and they looked great since they’re all the same aspect ratio. (If you don’t have ffmpeg, on a Mac install Homebrew and then use it to install ffmpeg)

If you try to use the same commands to create a 4:3 video for iPads, it’ll come out all distorted. I’m sure someone smarter than me could figure out how to make it maintain the original aspect ratio and just put black bars on the sides, but it seems like it would be better to create a native iPad video. 

Google Play lets you put in the URL to a YouTube video for your listing there, so I uploaded my video to YouTube and put the URL into the store listing. When I checked it on device though, only the left half of the video was showing. WTF? Apparently others have had the same problem. I followed the advice in this answer and uploaded the new video to YouTube and put the new link into Google Play, and now it shows up fine.

It’s no masterpiece, but it’s good enough for now! You can check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bul12DF3XfE

Note: I also tried TechSmith’s free AppShow labs experiment, which looked really easy to use but didn’t seem to have any way to speed up or slow down clips, which I needed. It also requires iOS8 and Yosemite. 

[wecannotfailblog-blog]

A well-written white paper discussing the degrees of anonymity in posts made to different social media apps.